Contents

Desktop

I used to (and sort-of-still-do, I guess) run a sister site focused on Google Chrome, Chromecast and Chromebooks, i.e. the Chrome ecosystem.

As such I am a fan of Chromebooks and Chrome OS, a Linux-based distribution based on Gentoo. The appearance of Chrome OS has waxed and waned in sync with Google’s ambitions and positioning for the OS, going form hyper-minimal to a full desktop clone (with the desktop-y Chrome Apps platform) through to a Material Design inspired Android + Chrome hybrid today.

Most people, don’t realize how prolific Linux has become. With the Embedded Linux Conference just a week away, I’ve been reflecting on how Linux has provided a sort of computing “circle of life” experience for me. It’s powered my computational hardware 20 years ago and continues to do so today.

Kernel Space

Well, we all have heard somewhere (if not using it already) about Linux an Operating System that hardly gets a virus, that runs applications created to run only on Linux and can’t run Windows and MacOS applications (at least not out of the box), and it’s free, as in free beer or as in speech. But how was Linux created? Why is it free? Who created it?

With last weekend mentioning ten exciting features of Linux 4.10, the tables have turned and now we are looking at ten features not found in the mainline our complete Linux 4.10 feature overview for all of the great stuff shipping in this kernel that should be out on Sunday. You may consider this article now as a bit of satire with some of these features weren’t expected to appear in Linux 4.10 in the first place, but I am just mentioning several things that aren’t in Linux 4.10 but some users would have found nice if they in fact happened.

The SystemTap team has announced the 3.1 release of the tool that allows extracting performance and debugging information at runtime from the kernel as well as various user-space programs. New features include support for adding probes to Python 2 and 3 functions, Java probes now convert all parameters to strings before passing them to probes, a new @variance() statistical operator has been added, new sample scripts have been added, and more.

Git also supports octopus merges, which have more than two parents. This seems strange for those of us who work on smaller projects: wouldn’t a merge with three or four parents be confusing? Well, it depends. Sometimes, a kernel maintainer needs to merge dozens of separate histories together at once. Having 30 merge commits, one after another, would be more confusing than a single 30-way merge, especially if that 30-way merge was conflict-free.

The term of art he used was more blunt: “The innovation the industry talks about so much is bullshit,” he said. “Anybody can innovate. Don’t do this big ‘think different’… screw that. It’s meaningless. Ninety-nine per cent of it is get the work done.”

In a deferential interview at the Open Source Leadership Summit in California on Wednesday, conducted by Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, Torvalds discussed how he has managed the development of the Linux kernel and his attitude toward work.

“All that hype is not where the real work is,” said Torvalds. “The real work is in the details.”

Hitting mainline LLVM this weekend is support for AMD Radeon GFX9 within the AMDGPU back-end, not to be confused with the AMDGPU DRM driver.

GFX9 is the architecture of Radeon’s upcoming Vega GPU launch. I was surprised to see today that initial AMDGPU GFX9 support landed in LLVM. Besides that initial commit landing AMDGPU GFX9 support was also a few other GFX9-related commits.

Applications

The terminal is the beating heart of Linux, no matter how hard today’s user-friendly graphical distros might try to push it into the background. If you need something done quickly and efficiently, chances are the best way to do it is with some complex keyboard wrangling. Exactly what to type is beyond the scope of this article – check out our guide here to get yourself started.

The key, if you’re a terminal-slinging Linux badass, is making sure you type those commands with as much style and panache as possible. And while you’ll likely never be in a position where you’re not able to drop to a straight full-screen shell, having a quick window to the command line on your desktop is always handy.

How do you keep track of ton of user accounts and passwords in this online age. I hope you do not use one password for all your online accounts as that is not safe. You need to come up with the unique and secure passwords for all your online services and accounts. So how do you manage or keep track of these passwords. In your memory? Come on! I recommend you use a password manager.

When setting up a German Equatorial Mount (GEM) for imaging, a critical aspect of capturing long-exposure images is to ensure a proper polar alignment. A GEM mount has two axis: Right Ascension (RA) axis and Declination (DE) axis. Ideally, the RA axis should be aligned with the celestial sphere polar axis. A mount’s job is to track the stars motion around the sky, from the moment they rise at the eastern horizon, all the way up across the median, and westward until they set.

As you may know, Atom is an open-source, multi-platform text editor developed by GitHub, having a simple and intuitive graphical user interface and a bunch of interesting features for writing: CSS, HTML, JavaScript and other web programming languages. Among others, it has support for macros, auto-completion a split screen feature and it integrates with the file manager.

Penguin Subtitle Player is especially useful for online video streaming websites that don’t support subtitles or don’t allow custom subtitles. You can also use Penguin Subtitle Player to display subtitles in a custom position, like on the black top/bottom bands, or to display multiple subtitles in the same time.

The Qt5 application should be able to display subtitles on top of any window, including HTML5 or Flash videos.

Until now, Penguin Subtitle Player (which we’ve covered before) only supported SRT subtitles, however, with the latest 1.0.0 version, released yesterday, the application received support for SSA/ASS subtitles.

Jam is a new Google Play Music console player for Linux and Windows. The application, which is written in Go, had its first alpha release about two weeks ago, and it’s currently at version 0.4.0.

Jam features a console interface very similar to that of Cmus, with easy keyboard navigation. While the interface is easy to use, it currently lacks a help screen, so for a list of keyboard shortcuts, see the Jam GitHub page.

The last time we put out a stable release was more than 2 years ago, so a lot of changes have made it into this new release. If you’re in a hurry and just want to try it out, the downloads are available from the Picard website.

Linux Digital Audio Workstations
When most people think of music programs, they’ll usually think Mac OS or Windows. However, there are also a few Linux digital audio workstations. The support and features of these programs can vary, but they’re a good choice to setup a cheap recording studio. Some of them are even good competitors for paid programs, offering features such as multitrack recording, MIDI, and virtual instruments.

Keep in mind that many audio editing programs for Linux rely on the Jack backend. You’ll need a dedicated system to install these programs on, since it doesn’t work properly in a virtual machine.

In the following article, we’ll cover audio editing programs that are available for Linux. We’ll talk about the available features, as well as help you decide which program to use for your needs.

For the most part, they’re wrong. Command-line image tools do much of what their GUI counterparts can, and they can do it just as well. Sometimes, especially when dealing with multiple image files or working on an older computer, command-line tools can do a better job.

Let’s take a look at four command-line tools that can ably handle many of your basic (and not-so-basic) image manipulation tasks.

CloudStats is an effective tool for Linux server monitoring and network monitoring. With CloudStats you get whole visibility into key performance criteria of your Linux Server. You can proactively track different server metrics like CPU, disk and memory usage, services, apps, processes and more. The best thing is that you don’t need to have any special technical skills – this tool for server monitoring is very easy to install and run from any device.

This blog-post is about a happy-end after a previously published blog-post named New Inkscape 0.92 breaks your previous works done with Inkscape published on 20 January. A lot of reactions did happen about this previous blog-post and the news get quickly viral. That’s why I thought it was nice to make another blog post to “close this case”.

Wine or Emulation

Games

The Unvanquished open-source first person shooter game had been very promising and issuing monthly alpha releases all the way up to 48 alpha versions while they ended that one year ago without any new releases. The project is still ongoing and they are preparing for a great 2017.

The Unvanquished team posted a teaser to their project site this weekend. They have been working on some “much bigger” changes. They aren’t saying what the next release will be, but most will know what generally follows alpha builds… I’m a big supporter of Unvanquished, and have heard from their project lead and look forward to what’s next

“RPG Maker MV CoreScript” is a game engine player for 2D games that runs on the browser. “RPG Maker MV CoreScript” is designed as a game engine dedicated to “RPG Maker MV”, the latest work of “RPG Maker” series of 2DRPG world number one software with more than 20 years history, and more than 1000 games are running. (February 2017)

Castle Game Engine is yet another open-source cross-platform game engine. What separates this game engine from others is that interestingly it’s written in Object Pascal.

Up until seeing this Castle Game Engine 6.0 release, I hadn’t thought of Object Pascal in a few years and interesting it’s being used by this game engine. Castle Engine 6.0 continues to be fitted for both 2D and 3D games and this latest release incorporates about one year of development work.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

Boudhayan Gupta dropped by for the final day of the Plasma Sprint because he had 3D printed that save icon and wanted to test it. Coincidently I found a treasure in the glove compartment of my dad’s car, a Eurythmics Greatest Hits audio CD.

The second point release update to our LTS release 16.04 is out now. This contains all the bugfixes added to 16.04 since its first release in April. Users of 16.04 can run the normal update procedure to get these bugfixes. In addition, we suggest adding the Backports PPA to update to Plasma 5.8.5. Read more about it: http://kubuntu.org/news/plasma-5-8-5-bugfix-release-in-xenial-and-yakkety-backports-now/

With Qt 5.8 there was experimental Direct3D 12 support that left some disappointed the toolkit didn’t opt for supporting Vulkan first as a cross-platform, high-performance graphics API. Fortunately, with Qt 5.10, there will be built-in Vulkan support.

Going back nearly one year there has been Vulkan work around Qt while with Qt 5.10 it’s becoming a reality. However, with Qt 5.9 not even being released until the end of May, Qt 5.10 isn’t going to officially debut until either the very end of 2017 or early 2018.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

Gnome 3 is a desktop environment that was created to fix a problem that did not exist. Much like PulseAudio, Wayland and Systemd, it’s there to give developers a job, while offering no clear benefit over the original problem. The Gnome 2 desktop was fast, lithe, simple, and elegant, and its replacement is none of that. Maybe the presentation layer is a little less busy and you can search a bit more quickly, but that’s about as far as the list of advantages goes, which is a pretty grim result for five years of coding.

Despite my reservation toward Gnome 3, I still find it to be a little bit more suitable for general consumption than in the past. Some of the silly early decisions have been largely reverted, and a wee bit more sane functionality added. Not enough. Which is why I’d like to take a moment or three to discuss some extra tweaks and changes you should add to this desktop environment to make it palatable.

Once day after the release of the GNOME 3.24 Beta desktop environment, the developers behind the GNOME Builder IDE (Integrated Development Environment) announced the release of a first Beta build towards the next major version of the application.

Today’s Beta milestone (technical version number is 3.23.90) is also the first development release of GNOME Builder 3.24, which means that we can finally get a taste of what’s coming next in the IDE. We’ve already told you last year in December that it will bring Flatpak support, but let’s find out what’s new in this Beta.

Ever since it was introduced, Linux has been gaining rapid popularity among users. Linux is used for networking, software development and web hosting. However, choosing the right distro is very important given that there are dozens of them which can fulfil your needs.

A distro, or distribution, is tech-talk for a Linux operating system (OS). Each distro is differentiated by its default interface, i.e. the way it looks, the library of apps officially supported by the specific “brand” of Linux, catalog of stock applications and even repositories. In the Linux world, there are hundreds of different flavors of distro. Examples include Debian, Ubuntu and Red Hat (among many others).

Reviews

I next turned my attention to a distribution which has only recently been added to the DistroWatch database: Clear Linux. The Clear Linux distribution is unusual in a few ways. For one, the project is not designed to be a full featured or general purpose operating system; Clear Linux focuses on performance more than features. The distribution is fairly minimal and is designed with cloud computing in mind, though it may also be used in other areas, particularly on servers.

Solus is an independent Linux distribution which targets desktop PC users. The project started in 2011 carrying the name “SolusOS” but later was changed to a plain “Solus”. What mainly makes Solus different is its desktop interface called “Budgie” beside a lot of other software like “eopkg” which is the distribution’s package manager.

Solus uses a rolling release model. Providing an updated ISO file of the distribution every few months containing the latest software and updates. This, however, doesn’t mean that the system is “unstable” like some other rolling Linux distributions.

There are a lot of exciting things when it comes to Solus. Its desktop interface “Budgie” is completely developed from scratch but is compatible with some GNOME technologies. It also has its own package manager called “eopkg” which uses .eopkg format for package files (it doesn’t depend on .deb or .rpm files nor can install them). “eopkg” was forked from Pardus Linux. But developers of Solus have plans to replace it with “sol“.

New Releases

Manjaro Fringilla was a great release! Now we are proud to announce our first release candidate of our next release, we call “Gellivara”. It took us more than two month to prepare this new release series for 2017.

After being in development for the past two weeks, IPFire 2.19 Core Update 109 has today hit the stable channel and it’s a recommended upgrade for all those who use the IPFire 2.19 series of the open-source, Linux-based firewall distro.

As noted in our previous report, the most important feature of IPFire 2.19 Core Update 109 is the inclusion of the unbound 1.6.0 recursive and caching DNS resolver in the distro’s built-in DNS proxy to address some important bugs, re-activate QNAME minimisation and hardening below NX domains, and implement the ability for the firewall to check if a router loses longer DNS responses.

This release of GParted restores the ability to move/resize primary partitions when an extended partition exists. The move/resize regression was introduced in version 0.28.0. This release also includes some minor bug fixes.

Arch Family

Hi guys, welcome to the 16th segment of “Introduction with Linux Distro”. Most of us know or heard about Arch Linux, which is one of the most widely used Linux distribution. For some reason, few users find it hard to install and use Arch. But in Linux world, there is almost always some alternative to your desired distribution. In today’s segment, we will be introducing an Arch-based distribution which turned it completely on user-friendly side. So, let’s get to know about Antergos Linux.

Slackware Family

In a previous post I mentioned that LibreOffice 5.3 was released the first of February. At that time, I provided you with a LibreOffice 5.2.5 package instead, because I was rebuilding the 5.2 packages anyway and usually I need a bit of research time to make new releases compile.

A redesign/ update for Anaconda install banners has been an ongoing project for me since the summer and has recently, in the passed month or so, had a fair amount of conversation on its Pagure ticket. I have done multiple series of iterations for these banners, and in the couple of weeks have established a design that represents the Fedora vibe. There are three, sort of, sub-categories for the banners: Common Banners, Server-specific Banners, and Desktop-specific Banners. At this point I have completed drafts of the Common banners (available on all editions) and the Desktop-specific banners (available in addition to Common for Desktop editions).

Tom Callaway seems to be a very nice person who has been overclocked to about 140% normal human speed. In only 20 minutes he gave an interesting and highly-amusing talk that could have filled a 45-minute slot on the legal principles that underpin Fedora, how they got that way, and how they work out in practice.

In the old days, Callaway said, Red Hat made Red Hat Linux, entirely in-house. What the company didn’t make was any money; sales of hats generated more profit than sales of Red Hat box sets, which apparently were sold at a loss. It was felt that this plan wouldn’t work out in the long term, so Red Hat changed to making Enterprise Linux. It didn’t want to stop doing a hobbyist Linux, however, so Fedora Core was launched. Red Hat also wanted the community to have input into what Fedora was, and how it looked, but the company couldn’t just drop the reins and let the community take over, because it was still legally the distributor.

Debian Family

Nothing distinguishes the Debian Linux distribution so much as its system of package repositories. Originally organized into Stable, Testing, and Unstable, additional repositories have been added over the years, until today it takes more than a knowledge of a repository’s name to understand how to use it efficiently and safely.

Debian repositories are installed with a section called main that consists only of free software. However, by editing the file /etc/apt/sources.list, you can add contrib, which contains software that depends on proprietary software, and non-free, which contains proprietary software. Unless you choose to use only free software, contrib and non-free are especially useful for video and wireless drivers.

You should also know that the three main repositories are named for characters from the Toy Story movies. Unstable is always called Sid, while the names of Testing and Stable change. When a new version of Debian is released, Testing becomes Stable, and the new version of Testing receives a name. These names are sometimes necessary for enabling a mirror site, but otherwise, ignoring these names gives you one less thing to remember.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

Canonical’s Sergio Schvezov proudly announced today, February 17, the immediate availability for download of the Snapcraft 2.27 open-source tool that lets application developers package their apps as Snaps.

Take a moment to note how big this is. Ubuntu 14.04 is a long-term release that will be supported until 2019. Ubuntu 16.04 is also a long-term release that will be supported until 2021. We have many many many users in both releases, some of which will stay there until we drop the support. Before this snappy new world, all those users were stuck with the versions of all their programs released in 2014 or 2016, getting only updates for security and critical issues. Just try to remember how your favorite program looked 5 years ago; maybe it didn’t even exist. We were used to choose between stability and cool new features.

Flavours and Variants

The hardcore Linux geeks won’t read this article. They’ll skip right past it… They don’t like Linux Mint much. There’s a good reason for them not to; it’s not designed for them. Linux Mint is for folks who want a stable, elegant desktop operating system that they don’t want to have to constantly tinker with. Anyone who is into Linux will find Mint rather boring because it can get as close to the bleeding edge of computer technology. That said, most of those same hardcore geeks will privately tell you that they’ve put Linux Mint on their Mom’s computer and she just loves it. Linux Mint is great for Mom. It’s stable, offers everything she needs and its familiar UI is easy for Windows refugees to figure out. If you think of Arch Linux as a finicky, high-performance sports car then Linux Mint is a reliable station wagon. The kind of car your Mom would drive. Well, I have always liked station wagons myself and if you’ve read this far then I guess you do, too. A ride in a nice station wagon, loaded with creature comforts, cold blowing AC, and a good sound system can be very relaxing, indeed.

We’ve got a lot of news to cover this month and many exciting details to share with you. Before we get started, I’d like to take a minute to thank the people who help our project grow. Many thanks to all our sponsors and all the people who send donations to us, many thanks for funding us. Special thanks also to the administration team for their work on the forums this month, the many artists who joined and participate in the design team and of course to our developers for the fantastic work we do together.

Linux Mint has issued their monthly report concerning their latest developments on this Debian/Ubuntu-derived distribution as well as work on the Cinnamon Desktop and their X-App programs.

They have been focusing on improving X-Apps, their collection of GTK-written programs for their distribution. They have made a number of improvements to the Xed test editor, including search support for regular expressions, switching between tabs with the mouse wheel, support for Python extensions, and much more.

Are you already comfortable working with Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) parts and looking for a challenge? We suspect many of you have cut your teeth on 8-bit through 32-bit microcontrollers but how much time have you spent playing with hardware interfaces on embedded Linux? Here a new quest, should you choose to accept it. [Matt Porter] spoke in detail about the Linux SPI Subsystem during his presentation at FOSDEM 2017. Why not grab an embedded Linux board and try your hand at connecting some extra hardware to one of the SPI buses?

The idea of having a computer in an altoids tin came to me back when in early 2012, shortly after the original raspberry pi came out. With the release of the pi zero, this became a possibility. The first version of the PiMiniMint contains a screen, wifi, Bluetooth, 32gb of storage, an infrared camera, and a full size USB port. When I decided to add a battery, I realized the camera needed to be removed. The current vision of the PiMiniMint contains a battery life of around 6-8hrs, a 2in screen, 32gb of storage, Bluetooth, wifi, and a full sized USB port (in the form of an OTG cable).

While gaming is not high on my agenda anymore (… or rather at all), I have recently been mulling buying a new console, to act as much as a home entertainment center as a gaming system.

Having owned several generations PlayStation and Sega products, a few new consoles caught my eye. While the most “open” solution, the Steambox sort-of fizzled out, Nintendo’s latest console Switch does seem to stand out of the crowd. The balance between power and portability looks like a good fit, and given Nintendo’s previous successes, it wouldn’t be surprising if it became a hit.

Phones

World has 2.5 Billion active users of mobile payments already in 2016. That is more than the total active user base of Facebook. The value of mobile payment transactions last year was worth $600 Billion dollars. Easily ten times bigger than the total combined value of all app stores, iOS, Google Play and others, put together. Just in tickets sold onto mobile alone, the world saw 11.5 Billion mobile tickets delivered last year. The bulk of those were on busses, trains and airplanes, not movies, rock concerts and lottery tickets. Mobile coupons are worth $30 Billion dollars all by that category alone. All this is discussed in today’s blog article. This article sets in proper relationship the various technologies that you probably have heard of about mobile payments such as mobile internet based services like Paypal, NFC based payments like Apple Pay, Starbucks style mobile wallets, M-Pesa style SMS payments, Bitcoins, but also QR codes, USSD, MMS and WAP Billing. This article offers the most thorough treatment of mobile payments in the public domain currently, and it focuses on where the money is. 54% of all mobile payments processed last year went through….. SMS. There are tons of case examples and statistics from all around the world: Australia, China, Finland, India, Japan, Kenya, Malaysia, Norway, Philippines, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, UK and USA. There are major corporations and brands discussed who do remarkable things with mobile payments today like Air Asia, Castrol, Coca Cola, Finnair, Lifebuoy, Nordstrom, Rihanna and Tally Weijl.

Tizen

It’s our vision that helps us shape what tomorrow’s technology will look like. Samsung Design America are no strangers to the idea of vision and want to conceptualise the future of television or in our case Tizen television.

Samsung wanted to realise how their products could adapt to this new world in which you are able to play any of the world’s media content, which is available anytime, anywhere on any given device.

Back in 2015, Japanese company NuAns showed off its Windows 10-powered Neo smartphone for the first time. It’s selling point was the TWOTONE interchangeable covers for its back. The phone debuted at CES 2016, post which the company announced its plans for the device’s global launch through a Kickstarter campaign.

If you’re a small business looking to take the next step in your evolution, you may be looking at implementing a customer relationship management (or CRM) solution. But with enterprise-grade vendors like Oracle and Salesforce charging such a high premium for their services, how can smaller companies afford to get started with CRM software?

The answer lies in open source. As with many kinds of software, there are multiple vendors who provide open source CRM solutions that are completely free to use. They may have restrictions on them, such as limited features and support, but for small businesses looking to try out CRM, they can be an excellent starting point.

Web server NGINX powers more than 317 million sites around the globes, and has rapidly replaced Apache as the engine of choice for the world’s 100,000 busiest, counting Netflix, Airbnb and Dropbox among its high-profile clients.

NGINX Inc – the company set up to commercialise the open source technology – has now set its sights on developing its business in Europe and recently opened a new EMEA headquarters in Cork, Ireland as a launching point to the region.

NGINX began life as a web server written by a Russian engineer called Igor Syosev in 2002 while he was working as a system administrator for the portal site Rambler.

Fermat has made upgrades to the technology and architecture behind the decentralized and blockchain-enabled open source project Internet of People (IoP). Its goal is providing device-to-device communication independent of any entity of web server.

Since its April 2016 launch, Fermat has added more than 60 national and regional chapters, each mining IoP tokens in a decentralized manner. Each chapter president is charged with advocating for the project in their community, running testnet nodes, organizing meet-ups, marketing, and token mining. Every chapter can run a single mining node and earn IoP tokens from the IoP blockchain as their reward.

Events

We just witnessed the end of FOSDEM 2017; The largest FOSS event in Europe. It held around 660 different events about a lot of different topics and aspects of open source software. You can check their summary here.

As #LinuxPlaya draws near, we’ve been preparing things to the event. We first did a workshop to help others to finish the GTK+Python tutorial for developers. While some other students from different universities in Lima did some posts to prove that they use Linux (FEDORA+GNOME). You can see in the following list, the various areas where they had worked: design, robotics, education, by using tech as Docker and a Snake GTK game.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

After a long wait, Debian developer Christoph Goehre was proud to announce a couple of days ago that the Mozilla Thunderbird email and news client has officially landed in the repositories of Debian GNU/Linux, de-branding Icedove.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

In this case, one image is better than 1,000 words, as the histogram represents donations during the first 10 days of each month, since May 2013, and doesn’t need any further comment. LibreOffice 5.3 has triggered 3,937 donations in February 2017, 1,800 more than in March 2016, and over 2,000 – sometimes over 3,000 – more than any other month. Donations are key to the life and the development of the project. Thanks, everyone.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

I’m a Linux desktop user, because Linux doesn’t try to lock me into their platform and services only to abandon me halfway through the journey.

Instead of having my access to remote management features, convenient encryption features, and even how long I’m allowed to use my own device be restricted by how much I’ve paid for my operating system edition; I’m free to choose whichever edition I want based on my needs of the moment.

Licensing/Legal

At FOSDEM last week, Conservancy’s Distinguished Technologist Bradley Kuhn delivered a keynote “Understanding The Complexity of Copyleft Defense.” The speech reviews the history of GPL enforcement efforts, pointing out development projects such as OpenWRT and SamyGo that began thanks to GPL compliance work. Kuhn focused in particular on how copyleft compliance can further empower users and developers as more kinds of devices run GPL’d software, and he concluded his remarks urging developers to take control of their own work by demanding to hold their own copyrights, using mechanisms such as Conservancy’s ContractPatch initiative.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

This is the first edition of TWTWTW, a weekly blog promoting interesting developments in the open source world. TWTWTW seeks to whet your curiosity. The name pays homage to the satirical British TV comedy programme aired in the early 1960s. Except satire isn’t the the raison d’etre for this blog. Instead, it provides a concise distilled commentary of notable open source related news from a different perspective. For the first edition, we present a brief catchup covering software, hardware, and a useful web service.

Programming/Development

The DWARF Debugging Information Format Standards Committee is pleased to announce the availability of Version 5 of the DWARF Debugging Format Standard. The DWARF Debugging Format is used to communicate debugging information between a compiler and debugger to make it easier for programmers to develop, test, and debug programs.

DWARF is used by a wide range of compilers and debuggers, both proprietary and open source, to support debugging of Ada, C, C++, Cobol, FORTRAN, Java, and other programming languages. DWARF V5 adds support for new languages like Rust, Swift, Ocaml, Go, and Haskell, as well as support for new features in older languages. DWARF can be used with a wide range of processor architectures, such as x86, ARM, PowerPC, from 8-bit to 64-bit.

A lengthy and strongly opinionated post about Python features to the python-ideas mailing list garnered various responses there, from some agreement to strong disagreement to calling it “trolling”, but it may also lead the Python community to better define what Python is. Trolling seems a somewhat unfair characterization, but Simon Lovell’s “Python Reviewed” post did call out some of the fundamental attributes of the language and made some value judgments that were seen as either coming from ignorance of the language or simply as opinions that were stated as facts in a brusque way. The thread eventually led to the creation of a document meant to help head off this kind of thread in the future.

This teenager got seriously creative to get a better view at a music concert.

Adam Boyd said he bluffed his way into the VIP area at the Albert Hall in Manchester, northern England, on Friday night after editing The Sherlocks’ Wikipedia page on his cell phone to say he was the lead singer’s cousin.

He then showed the switched-up entry to a security guard, who let him slide into the roped-off section without issue.

The concept of a connected car, or a car equipped with Internet access, has been gaining popularity for the last several years. The case in point is not only multimedia systems (music, maps, and films are available on-board in modern luxury cars) but also car key systems in both literal and figurative senses. By using proprietary mobile apps, it is possible to get the GPS coordinates of a car, trace its route, open its doors, start its engine, and turn on its auxiliary devices. On the one hand, these are absolutely useful features used by millions of people, but on the other hand, if a car thief were to gain access to the mobile device that belongs to a victim that has the app installed, then would car theft not become a mere trifle?

Troy Hunt sees more breached records than most of us, running the popular ethical data breach search service “Have I been pwned.” In a session at the RSA Conference this week, Hunt entertained the capacity crowd with tales both humorous and frightening about breaches that he has been involved with.

One of things that Hunt said he is often asked is exactly how he learns about so many breaches. His answer was simple.

“Normally stuff just gets sent to me,” Hunt said.

He emphasized that he doesn’t want to be a disclosure channel for breaches, as that’s not a role he wants to play. Rather his goal is more about helping people to be informed and protect themselves.

Google’s Gmail web email service is used by millions of companies and consumers around the world, making it an attractive target for attackers. In a session at the RSA Conference here, Elie Bursztein, anti-fraud and abuse research team lead at Google, detailed the many technologies and processes that Google uses to protect users and the Gmail service itself from exploitation.

hen you sell a car, typically the new owner gets the keys to the car and the original owner walks away. With a connected car, Charles Henderson, global head of X-Force Red at IBM Security, found that the original owner still has remote access capabilities, even years after the car has been sold.

Henderson revealed his disturbing new research into a previously unexplored area of internet of things (IoT) security at the RSA Conference here on Feb. 17. In a video interview with eWEEK, Henderson detailed the management issue he found with IoT devices and why it’s a real risk.

“As smart as a connected car is, it’s not smart enough to know that it has been sold, and that poses a real problem,” Henderson said.

Defence/Aggression

Thousands of Roman Catholics marched in the Philippines capital Manila on Saturday in the biggest gathering denouncing extra-judicial killings and a government plan to reimpose the death penalty for criminals.

Dubbed a “Walk for Life” prayer rally and endorsed by the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP), the gathering came just days after the church launched its strongest attack against President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs.

Organizers claimed as many as 50,000 people took part in the march toward Manila’s Rizal Park, while about 10,000 based on police estimates stayed to hear speeches.

More than 7,600 people have been killed since Duterte launched his anti-drugs campaign seven months ago. More than 2,500 died in shootouts during raids and sting operations, according to the police.

Amid mounting criticism about a surge in killings, Duterte said on Saturday that the campaign was “by and large successful”.

Speaking at the Philippine Military Academy’s alumni homecoming in Baguio City, he said the drug problem was more complex than he initially thought, prompting him to seek military support.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

The Courage Foundation calls for an immediate end to all legal and political persecution against Zambian journalist Dr. Fred M’membe, his lawyer and his family.

While he was giving a lecture in Jamaica, Dr M’membe’s home in Zambia was raided and his wife, Mutinta Mazoka M’membe, was arrested, detained for two nights and then released on bail. She’s due to face charges in court on 3 March.

Ecuador was hit by a Twitterstorm on Thursday as people around the world joined a national campaign to pressure the South American country’s right-wing presidential candidates to retract their promises to kick famed whistleblower Julian Assange out of the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

In the final days of Ecuador’s presidential campaign, WikiLeaks republishes U.S. diplomatic cables related to the three major candidates.

As Ecuador’s leading presidential candidate of the governing Alianza Pais party, Lenin Moreno, wrapped up his campaign with a massive rally in the nation’s capital, Quito, on Wednesday, WikiLeaks tweeted out portions of the U.S. diplomatic cables related to the three major candidates in Sunday’s election.

Turkey, already in the midst of a crackdown on the media, has arrested a journalist for reporting on hacked emails that revealed apparent corruption in the country’s government. His colleagues say he may have been caught after sharing a group direct message on Twitter with a hacker group and several fellow journalists.

Deniz Yucel, a Turkey correspondent for the German newspaper Die Welt, has been held in police custody since Tuesday, the paper has reported. Yucel is the seventh journalist jailed for reporting about the emails of Turkey’s Energy Minister Berat Albayrak, which were publicly released in October by the marxist hacktivist group RedHack, then indexed by WikiLeaks.

If convicted, he faces up to five years in prison.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

A large research synthesis, published in one of the world’s most influential scientific journals, has detected a decline in the amount of dissolved oxygen in oceans around the world — a long-predicted result of climate change that could have severe consequences for marine organisms if it continues.

The paper, published Wednesday in the journal Nature by oceanographer Sunke Schmidtko and two colleagues from the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany, found a decline of more than 2 percent in ocean oxygen content worldwide between 1960 and 2010. The loss, however, showed up in some ocean basins more than others. The largest overall volume of oxygen was lost in the largest ocean — the Pacific — but as a percentage, the decline was sharpest in the Arctic Ocean, a region facing Earth’s most stark climate change.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

It’s with a whiff of desperation that President Trump insists these days that he’s the chief executive Washington needs, the decisive dealmaker who, as he said during the campaign, “alone can fix it.” What America has seen so far is an inept White House led by a celebrity apprentice.

This president did not inherit “a mess” from Barack Obama, as he likes to say, but a nation recovered from recession and with strong alliances abroad. Mr. Trump is well on his way to creating a mess of his own, weakening national security and even risking the delivery of basic government services. Most of the top thousand jobs in the administration remain vacant. Career public servants are clashing with inexperienced “beachhead” teams appointed by the White House to run federal agencies until permanent staff members arrive.

Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein has attacked Donald Trump’s “lying” and said his attacks on the media are more treacherous than those of Richard Nixon, the president he helped bring down.

Bernstein, whose reporting with Bob Woodward and Ben Bradlee helped exposed the Watergate scandal of the 1970s, has told his 26,000 twitter followers: “The most dangerous ‘enemy of the people’ is presidential lying – always. Attacks on the press by Donald Trump [are] more treacherous than Nixon’s.”

Apparently questioning Trump’s mental stability, Bernstein added: “Real news (not fake) is that Donald Trump is trying to make conduct of the press the issue instead of egregious (and unhinged) conduct of POTUS [President of the United States].”

Newly leaked audio from a November party at President Trump’s Bedminster, N.J., golf club reveals then president-elect Trump touting to guests his scheduled interviews on premises with potential cabinet members and White House staff.

“We’re doing a lot of interviews tomorrow — generals, dictators, we have everything,” Trump says in the tape, obtained by Politico and published Saturday. “You may wanna come around. It’ll be fun. We’re really working tomorrow. We have meetings every 15, 20 minutes with different people that will form our government.”

A lot of people seem to be questioning President Trump’s mental health. This month, Representative Ted Lieu, a California Democrat, went so far as to say he was considering proposing legislation that would require a White House psychiatrist.

More controversial is the number of mental health experts who are joining the chorus. In December, a Huffington Post article featured a letter written by three prominent psychiatry professors that cited President Trump’s “grandiosity, impulsivity, hypersensitivity to slights or criticism, and an apparent inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality” as evidence of his mental instability. While stopping short of giving the president a formal psychiatric diagnosis, the experts called for him to submit to a full medical and neuropsychiatric evaluation by impartial investigators.

A practicing psychologist went further in late January. He was quoted in a U.S. News and World Report article titled “Temperament Tantrum,” saying that President Trump has malignant narcissism, which is characterized by grandiosity, sadism and antisocial behavior.

He had posted and then quickly deleted a slightly different version of the tweet just a few minutes earlier, which omitted ABC and CBS. He also included the word “SICK!” at the end of the original post.

The tweet came one day after Trump held an adversarial and lengthy news conference, in which he berated the media as “very fake news” and dismissed news reports about his and his associates’ ties to Russia as a “ruse.”

Donald Trump has branded his critics in the US press “not my enemy” but the “enemy of the American people”, in a tweet that came a day after he launched a sustained attack on the media during a White House press conference.

In his latest barb aimed at US journalists, the Republican billionaire took to Twitter to accuse reporters of publishing “fake news” and singled out several broadcasters for criticism.

Signed a bill to allow coal-mining operations to put more pollution in streams. That’s really not an ungenerous reading of the bill Trump signed on Thursday. The legislation, as David Dayen outlined recently, used a heretofore rarely used mechanism instituted by the Congressional Review Act of 1996 (CRA), by which Congress can junk recent regulations and prevent the executive branch from ever signing something similar in the future without Congress. By signing the bill, Trump eliminated an Obama rule that protected 6,000 miles of streams and 52,000 square miles of forest from mountaintop-removal operations that dump debris rich with heavy metals into nearby ecosystems.

Petrozavodsk businessman and Karelian Republic opposition leader Vasili Popov has been granted political asylum in Finland. He confirmed his status to a reporter on the public broadcaster Yle’s Novosti Russian-language news team on Friday.

Before fleeing to Finland in the spring of 2015, Popov was a leader in the liberal Russian United Democratic Party known as Yabloko in the Karelian Republic, a federal subject of Russia.

In August 2015, Yle reported that Russian authorities had declared Popov to be detained in absentia, as an international search warrant for his arrest was issued via the international police body Interpol. The tabloid Ilta-Sanomat reported at the time that Popov was arrested by Finnish police from his Joensuu home at the request of Russian authorities.

Censorship/Free Speech

The ACLU of Maryland contends Gov. Larry Hogan’s deletion of Facebook comments is tantamount to censorship.

The civil rights organization sent the Republican governor a letter Friday outlining its legal argument that Hogan violated the First Amendment rights of his constituents when he deleted their comments from his official Facebook page and banned some people from posting.

The motion skims the history of e-mail and points out that the well-known fields of e-mail messages, like “to,” “from,” “cc,” “subject,” “message,” and “bcc,” were used in ARPANET e-mail messages for years before Ayyadurai made his “EMAIL” program.

Ayyadurai focuses on statements calling him a “fake,” a “liar,” or a “fraud” putting forth “bogus” claims. Masnick counters that such phrases are “rhetorical hyperbole” meant to express opinions and reminds the court that “[t]he law provides no redress for harsh name-calling.”

This week started with controversial PewDiePie news—and that’s how it’s going to end, too. The YouTube megastar, whose real name is Felix Kjellberg, posted a response video today addressing The Wall Street Journal’s report about alleged anti-Semitic comments. Those comments cost him both a lucrative contract with Disney and his deal with YouTube Red.

In his response, Kjellberg apologized for jokes that “went too far” and acknowledged that he offended people. But he also claimed that “old-school media” (in this case the Journal) attacked him personally for being a YouTube personality who makes a substantial living off the online video platform.

The head of Rozcomnadzor, the body that oversees website-blocking in Russia, made a shocking statement this week. According to Alexander Zharov, children under ten years of age shouldn’t use the Internet, and there’s “nothing good” about a three-year-old who uses a tablet to watch cartoons.

‘Europe’s nightmare is over” was the dramatic first sentence of the Irish Independent’s editorial on the day when Victory in Europe was celebrated, marking the end of six years of “slaughter and desolation” on the continent. The paper suggested that it would be up to future historians to argue over whether “it was the tenacity and resources of the British, the colossal weight of American intervention, or the astonishing power of Russia” which had played the decisive role in Germany’s downfall. Looking back at it now it is easier to agree that it was a combination of all three.

Privacy/Surveillance

In this thesis we translate Brandt’s privacy preserving sealed-bid online auction protocol from RSA to elliptic curve arithmetic and analyze the theoretical and practical benefits. With Brandt’s protocol, the auction outcome is completely resolved by the bidders and the seller without the need for a trusted third party. Loosing bids are not revealed to anyone. We present libbrandt, our implementation of four algorithms with different outcome and pricing properties, and describe how they can be incorporated in a real-world online auction system. Our performance measurements show a reduction of computation time and prospective bandwidth cost of over 90% compared to an implementation of the RSA version of the same algorithms. We also evaluate how libbrandt scales in different dimensions and conclude that the system we have presented is promising with respect to an adoption in the real world.

After exhausting our legal options, Riseup recently chose to comply with two sealed warrants from the FBI, rather than facing contempt of court (which would have resulted in jail time for Riseup birds and/or termination of the Riseup organization). The first concerned the public contact address for an international DDoS extortion ring. The second concerned an account using ransomware to extort money from people.

Cryptocurrency will cripple governmental ability to collect taxes, and they won’t see it coming. When it’s already happened, expect major changes to take place in how society is organized on a large scale – but also expect governments to act in desperation to retain control.

As bitcoin launched in 2009, most early adopters saw its disruptive potential. While bitcoin has stalled for some time approaching a valid use of the term “stagnation”, cryptocurrency in a larger context is still just as disruptive. In 2011, I stated that bitcoin (cryptocurrency) will do to banks what e-mail did to the postal services. This is not just true, but it will be even more brutal to governments, and by extension, governmental services.

Now, governments love anything that smells like innovation, because it means jobs, this magic word that smells of magic unicorns to anybody in government. Therefore, people who like innovation are nurturing this bitcoin thing, this cryptocurrency thing, this ethereum thing (as if governments made a difference, but still). Lots of startups in tip-of-the-spear financial technology means that their government may get a head start over other governments. They have no idea that cryptocurrency will radically scale back the power of government, not just their own one, but also all those other governments over which it seeks a competitive edge.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has just published a 5,700 word “letter” on his profile, where he asserts that Facebook represents one of history’s “great leaps.” Though he covers a number of topics, what’s most interesting is how he positions Facebook as a force for political change in the coming years. His goals are lofty, sometimes even grandiose. That’s not the problem.

The problem is a fundamental contradiction built into the way he hopes to create what he calls a “global community” by essentially gerrymandering the Internet.

IN GERMANY, people are outraged by the news that a doll that can listen to what a child says, record that information, connect to the internet and be hacked.

We have heard of bad dolls before. Often they appear in horror movies like Child’s Play, sometimes they are just cursed and live on a shelf in your nan’s spare bedroom with eyes that follow you around. In this instance it is a doll called Cayla.

Mark Zuckerberg opens his missive with a grammatical ambiguity: who are “we”? Is this a letter to Facebook, or to the world? It can be read both ways. But regardless of the intended audience, there’s a subtext to the opening paragraph which informs the whole 5,700-word letter: for an increasing number of people, the answer to Zuckerberg’s question is “no”. Zuckerberg wants for more than Facebook to be an insanely profitable mega-corporation. He wants the company to be seen as a force for good in the world, and right now, he’s concerned that it isn’t.

When I ask Mark Zuckerberg if the presidential election changed the way he sees Facebook—if he made poor assumptions, if Facebook functioned in ways he didn’t intend—he pauses.

I’ve interviewed Zuckerberg before, and he tends to pause like this, gathering his thoughts in complete silence, sometimes turning to face the empty space across the room. But this dead air lasts particularly long. Five seconds. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. “I don’t know,” he finally says. “It’s a very interesting question.” Pause.

“If you continue giving people voice and work to create a diversity of ideas and common understanding and strengthen the social fabric,” he says, not directly answering the question, “then over the long term we will go in the right direction regardless if you disagree on short-term things.”

A Belgian ethical hacker has created an online tool, named Stalkscan, that shows you how powerful Facebook’s search tool is and what kind of information is available on the social network publicly. All you need to do is type the URL of a person’s profile in the web interface and you’re good to go. The creator of the tool also outlines that the tool doesn’t violate Facebook’s privacy policies.

How does Facebook know what to show to you? How does it make predictions and guesses your interest? Some of you might be having a rough idea that Facebook’s algorithms keep tracking your activity and user-interactions, but what’s the real deal?

Researchers have recently developed the first reliable technique for websites to track visitors even when they use two or more different browsers. This shatters a key defense against sites that identify visitors based on the digital fingerprint their browsers leave behind.

State-of-the-art fingerprinting techniques are highly effective at identifying users when they use browsers with default or commonly used settings. For instance, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s privacy tool, known as Panopticlick, found that only one in about 77,691 browsers had the same characteristics as the one commonly used by this reporter. Such fingerprints are the result of specific settings and customizations found in a specific browser installation, including the list of plugins, the selected time zone, whether a “do not track” option is turned on, and whether an adblocker is being used.

Civil Rights/Policing

Writer Shazia Hobbs was invited to Cleveland Police HQ, in Middlesborough, to speak at a conference titled ‘It’s Not OK’. The event was about breaking the silence on sexual violence and how to better protect victims. Shazia was representing the Halo Project Charity, an organisation that supports victims of honour-based violence, forced marriages and FGM Here’s what she had to say on the subject.

“Two days ago four men came, grabbed me and started raping me. Most women and girls in the camp have been assaulted or raped by gangs,” begins Hodan Ahmedan, 23, sitting in her makeshift shelter where she has lived since she arrived from drought-ridden eastern Somaliland to a camp for internally displaced in Maxamed Mooge, Hargeisa.

Cases of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) are rife here. A lack of police presence, inadequate lighting, an absence of sanitary facilities and an increase in the number of female-only households has rendered this camp an ideal ground for SGBV. “The ground is really hard here so we can’t dig to make lavatories.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit covers the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas, the second most populous state. The court has issued a decision that clearly establishes the right to record police, which did not previously exist in the Fifth Circuit.

The plaintiff, Phillip Turner, was recording a Fort Worth police station (6:35 YouTube) from a public sidewalk (known as a “First Amendment audit”) when officers approached him and asked for identification. Turner refused to ID himself and was eventually handcuffed and placed in the back of a patrol car. Turner was released at the scene and later filed charges against three officers (amended to include the City of Fort Worth) under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, alleging violations of his First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights. The officers moved to dismiss the case, claiming qualified immunity, which was granted by the district court. The Fifth Circuit has affirmed, reversed, and remanded portions of the district court’s decision in what can be considered an overall win for Mr. Turner (10:59 YouTube).

In a major show of strength against Islamic Terrorism, around 1,00,000 Hindus of all race, color and gender marched and rallied through the streets of Kolkata in the state of West Bengal, India. On the occasion of the Foundation Day of the organization Hindu Samhati, the organizers recalled the sufferings of the Hindu community worldwide. Founded in 2008, Hindu Samhati is a Hindu organization working on ground in West Bengal and in the other states of Eastern India.

In recent years there is a tremendous growth of Radical Islam in the Eastern part of India. There has been a series of attacks on the Hindu community. According to Tapan Ghosh, President and Founder of Hindu Samhati, who is also a Monk, “In 2016 attack against the Hindu community started with the burning of the Kaliachak Police Station of Malda by the Islamic Radicals (on 3rd of January). It ended with the misery of the Hindus in Dhulagarh in Howrah (on 14th December). In between these two incidents, Hindus of Bengal had to witness countless episodes of gruesome attacks and Jihadi atrocities throughout this year. Kaligram, Ramganz, Ilambazar, Tufanganz, Chopra, Naihati, Kharagpur, Shankrail, Mallarpur, Baduria, Mohammadbazar, Barchandghar, Jalangee, Toltoli and many more places observed similar occurrences. The sheer volumes of these events, the limitless atrocities and unparalleled aggression have become the eye-openers for the Hindus. The persecuted people in Eastern India are seeing the organization as their only hope”.

Anila Dhawan, 17, was kidnapped last spring from her home in Hyderabad, forced to convert to Islam and marry her abductor.

The police refused to intervene. Her kidnapper told them she ran away from home, and converted to Islam and married him voluntarily. But after her family pressured a court to intervene, she told judges the truth and they freed her.

“Her life was threatened,” her attorney, Ramesh Gupta, said. “She wanted to go back to her parents and the statement (she made to the court) helped to sway the decision in her favor and she was freed to join her family.”

Anila is one of many Pakistani Hindu girls kidnapped because of religious discrimination in a country that is 98% Muslim.

“On Sunday 26 February, the night of the Oscars, we’re transforming Trafalgar Square into London’s biggest cinema,” says Sadiq Khan in a publicity video for the screening of Iran’s Oscar-nominated film, The Salesman.

“I want to welcome people from all across the capital and beyond,” the Khan adds – “khan” in Persian is aptly the daddy, godfather, don, the head of the village – “to share in this celebration of London as an international hub of creativity and as a global beacon of openness and diversity.”

But hold on – why is London doing this when Tehran is holding one of its citizens in jail over unclear charges and refusing her urgent medical care?

DRM

Apple is planning to fight proposed electronics “Right to Repair” legislation being considered by the Nebraska state legislature, according to a source within the legislature who is familiar with the bill’s path through the statehouse.

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

As the world continues to get used to an America with a President Donald Trump at its head, the binary nature of the current political climate has reared its own head in unfortunate ways. One example of this is the stunning speed with which many of those previously ignorant of the emoluments clause of the Constitution, as the Title of Nobility Clause is commonly called, have feigned familiarity with it. As one of my colleagues here termed it, the “emoluments hunting” going on is transparently political in nature, rather than representing a serious effort at protecting the public interest from the shadow of undue influence and sanctioned bribery over our highest political office.

Copyrights

Five years ago the US Government launched a criminal case against Megaupload and several of its former employees. One of the main allegations in the indictment is that the site only deleted links to copyright-infringing material, not the actual files. Interestingly, this isn’t too far off from what cloud hosting providers such as Google Drive and Dropbox still do today.

A new study from Sweden has found that just over half of all young people admit to obtaining movies and TV shows from the Internet without paying, a figure that rockets to 70% among young men. With The Pirate Bay about to be blocked by one ISP with more to follow, can piracy rates be controlled?

A District Court judge in Seattle has taken a novel approach in a series of default judgments targeting alleged BitTorrent pirates. Since the defendants are accused of sharing files in the same swarm, they should also share the penalty among each other, the judge argues. According to the order, these cases are not intended to provide a windfall to filmmakers.

Copyright reform is the largest, loudest and most divisive battle in EU policy this year. It pits the full might of Paris and Berlin with Europe’s deep-rooted publishing industry, against internet search giants, pirates and the speed of technological change.

The rules that govern who’s allowed to make copies of music, films, books and other media were last updated in 2001, before internet streaming existed and when piracy’s biggest villain was Napster’s MP3 file-sharing service. Now illegally downloading content is a habit for tens of millions of Europeans, who often struggle to find a legal version of the content they’re after. Or just don’t want to pay.

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One might not expect this from a so-called 'charity'; the Gates Foundation's critics are often met with unprecedented aggression, threats and retribution, which make one wonder if it's really a charity or a greedy cult of personalities (Bill and Melinda)

The assault on the media by Bill Gates is a subject not often explored by the media (maybe because a lot of it is already bribed by him); but we're beginning to gather new and important evidence that explains how critics are muzzled (even fired) and critical pieces spiked, never to see the light of day anywhere

Microsoft buying GitHub does not demonstrate that Microsoft loves Open Source (GitHub is not Open Source and may never be) but that it loves monopoly and coercion (what GitHub is all about and why it must be rejected)

The European Patent Office (EPO) keeps granting fake patents that cause a lot of real harm (examiners are pressured to play along and participate in this unlawful agenda); nobody is happy except those who profit from needless, frivolous lawsuits

After contributing to the cancellation of Richard Stallman (RMS) based on some falsehoods perpetuated in the media we're seeing the sort of thing one might expect from IBM (more so now that it totally controls Fedora and RHEL)

The coup to remove (or remove power from) Stallman and Torvalds, the GNU and Linux founders respectively, is followed by outsourcing of their work to Microsoft’s newly-acquired monopoly (GitHub) and appointment of Microsoft workers or Microsoft-friendly people, shoehorning them into top roles under the disingenuous guise of "professionalism"